Dinner at Number Seventeen

The woman who opened the door was not Beth. She was about seventy, wore a silver necklace shaped like a beetle and looked at the cake in Alice’s hands with immediate approval.

“You’re early,” she said. “Good. You can help.”

Alice stepped inside before asking the sensible question. Beth had moved recently. The message said seventeen, the lane was dark and the house smelled of roasting garlic. There were enough reasons to believe she was in the right place if she ignored the absence of anybody she knew.

The woman took her coat. “I’m Celia. Put the cake in the kitchen. Theo’s in there pretending to understand the oven.”

Alice assumed Celia was somebody’s mother. Beth invited people from every corner of her life, then abandoned them together while looking for candles. Alice had come prepared to spend an evening identifying strangers through context. At thirty-three, she considered herself competent at it.

Theo stood beside the oven holding a folded dish towel. He had dark hair, a narrow face and the expression of a man confronting instructions written by an enemy. He looked at Alice and smiled.

“Please tell me you know what this symbol means.”

She put down the cake. “It appears to be a fan having a difficult day.”

“That’s my interpretation too.”

They found the setting Celia wanted. Alice washed her hands and began cutting carrots because they were there and because a useful task relieved her of having to explain who she was. Theo peeled potatoes badly. They discussed ovens, then the astonishing number of utensils available to perform almost the same job.

“How do you know everyone?” he asked.

“Through Beth.”

He nodded without recognition. “Of course.”

She should have noticed. Instead she asked how he knew Celia. He said it was a complicated family connection and he wasn’t entirely certain the family knew about it yet. Alice assumed divorce, remarriage or one of Beth’s stories that required a diagram.

In the next room Celia put on music. There was a table laid for three. Alice saw it while carrying a bowl through and stopped.

“Are there only three of us?”

“Unless you’re expecting somebody,” Celia said.

Alice looked back towards the kitchen. Theo had followed her carrying the potatoes. He looked at the table, then at her.

“I’m sorry,” Alice said. “Where is Beth?”

Celia considered this. “I don’t know a Beth.”

The music continued cheerfully through the silence. Alice took out her phone. Beth’s message read number seven. Alice had supplied the extra digit from the name of a restaurant they discussed earlier. She stared at the screen, then at Celia’s beetle necklace.

“I’m in the wrong house.”

Theo looked at his own phone. “That makes two of us.”

His message said seventeen, but a different lane. He was meeting his cousin’s new partner for dinner. There were two Willow Lanes in adjoining parts of town, a fact apparently well understood by everybody except the people invited to eat in them.

Celia sat down and began laughing. Not politely. She laughed until she had to remove her glasses. Alice felt the heat move from her face to her ears.

“You let us cook,” Theo said.

“You arrived holding things and being helpful. I’m not an ungrateful woman.”

“Were you expecting anyone?” Alice asked.

“No.”

“Then why three places?”

“I laid the other two when you started discussing carrots. I thought perhaps my daughter had sent you. She’s always arranging things without asking.”

Alice covered her face. Theo put down the potatoes before laughing himself. The sheer completeness of the mistake made embarrassment almost useless. There was no dignified version to rescue.

They both called their actual hosts. Beth answered immediately and demanded to know why Alice was apparently cooking for strangers. Theo’s cousin was less amused, having spent half an hour wondering whether he had made an excuse not to meet the new partner.

“We should go,” Alice told Celia.

Celia looked at the table. “You can. But the vegetables will be done in ten minutes, and I was rather enjoying your company.”

Alice hesitated. She wanted to stay, which felt more revealing than entering the wrong house. Theo said he could return after making a brief appearance at the correct address. His cousin lived only a short drive away. Celia said the vegetables were unlikely to remain perfect through a family introduction.

“Or,” she added, “you could explain the truth and come here another evening.”

They both looked at their phones. Alice told Beth what happened. Beth laughed, asked whether she was safe and said she could come later for pudding. Theo spoke quietly to his cousin in the hallway. When he returned, he looked relieved.

“Thursday,” he said. “At the right house. With a cake of my own.”

Celia stood. “Excellent. Sit down before anybody else knocks.”

The meal was lamb, carrots, potatoes and a sauce Celia admitted came from a jar. Alice’s cake was lemon, bought from a bakery because she left work late. Theo had brought wine neither host had requested. Their accidental dinner possessed a remarkable coherence for something founded on two mistakes.

Celia explained that she liked cooking a roast even when it meant eating variations of it for days. The freezer usually received half. Her daughter had sent friends round with a parcel the previous week, so a confident visitor carrying cake had seemed a continuation of somebody else’s arrangements. Theo confessed he introduced himself at the door but never mentioned his cousin’s name. Alice said she had mistaken the shopping pad on the counter for one Beth owned. They compared the small assumptions that built the evening, each perfectly reasonable until placed beside the others. Celia asked whether either of them had ever worked in intelligence. They agreed the public had been spared that particular danger, and the meal continued with considerably less need to make a good impression.

Alice learned that Celia had been a school librarian and now sang in a choir that spent more time discussing refreshments than music. Theo designed packaging for industrial parts. Alice worked in a small architecture practice, mostly persuading people that dimensions remained important even when they disliked them.

“So both of you put things in boxes,” Celia said.

“His are better labelled,” Alice replied.

Theo smiled at her over his glass. She noticed his hands then, and the little pause before he answered a question seriously. She noticed that he listened to Celia without performing the exaggerated patience people sometimes offered older strangers. She wanted to know whether he always laughed with one corner of his mouth first.

After the main course, Celia brought out photographs of a kitchen renovation because Alice made the mistake of asking about the wall between the rooms. Theo asked to see the earlier version. Celia found the album and stayed beside him on the sofa, describing the man who fitted the cupboards and disappeared before attaching the handles.

Alice washed plates. She could hear them laughing. For years she had been good at turning up, helping, leaving before anybody noticed she had said little about herself. At a dinner where she knew nobody, she had again found her way to a sink.

Theo appeared with three empty glasses. “Would you like me to finish?”

“Nearly done.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

She looked at him. He was not rescuing her from a duty. He was offering to share it. She handed him the cloth and dried while he washed. He asked whether she enjoyed her work. She answered properly, including the part about wanting to design more and manage other people’s revisions less.

He said he once spent a week choosing how a lid should fold and enjoyed almost every minute. She asked him to show her. He drew it on a scrap of paper from Celia’s shopping pad, and she watched his concentration with an interest that had nothing to do with packaging.

They ate cake at ten. Alice sent Beth a photograph of the table and promised to make up for missing dinner. Beth replied that she hoped the strangers understood how much gossip this would require. Alice turned the phone face down.

Theo walked her to the corner afterwards. Celia stood in the doorway and insisted they both return the following month, now that they knew where she lived. The lane smelled of wet leaves. Alice’s coat was buttoned incorrectly. She noticed halfway to the main road and stopped to fix it.

Theo waited. “Do you think she’s invited every lost person who ever knocked?”

“I hope so.”

“I was hoping we were unusual.”

She looked up. There it was, the opening she could step through or turn into a joke. She had been alone for two years, not miserably, but carefully. Most invitations arrived through friends and became occasions to prove she was doing perfectly well.

“Would you like dinner at the correct address next time?” she asked.

“With you?”

“That would be the general idea.”

He grinned. They exchanged numbers beneath a streetlamp. He kissed her cheek, then looked at her as though another decision was possible. She made it easier for both of them by kissing him herself.

Their first planned date was less effortless. The restaurant was crowded, Theo arrived worried after a difficult day and Alice had spent too long selecting clothes that made her look unconcerned. For twenty minutes they repeated safe stories from Celia’s table, trying to recreate something that had not known it needed recreating.

Then Theo put down his menu. “I think we were less nervous when we thought we were somebody else’s guests.”

Alice laughed. “I was wondering whether I should go and chop something.”

He reached across the table, palm up. She took his hand. They ordered food, asked new questions and let the evening become its own thing. It was not as magical as the wrong house. It was better evidence that they might enjoy the right one.

A month later they returned to Celia’s together. Alice brought flowers. Theo brought the folding box he had drawn, containing biscuits from a shop he liked. Celia examined the mechanism before opening it and said he must have been very patient with things that did not care how hard he worked.

“Most days,” he said.

Beth joined them for pudding. She wanted to inspect the scene of the disappearance and had negotiated her invitation directly. Celia liked her immediately. Theo’s cousin and his partner were invited another time, when the table could be extended.

As Alice laid the plates, Celia asked whether she had regretted the mistake. Alice looked towards the kitchen, where Theo was arguing mildly with the oven again.

“Only the first five minutes after finding out.”

“Sensible,” Celia said. “People miss a great deal trying to leave before they’ve been embarrassed.”

Alice carried the last plate through. At the table there were four places, deliberately laid. Theo moved her chair an inch so it didn’t catch the rug, then sat beside her. For once she had arrived exactly where she meant to be, and still had no idea what would happen next.